Quote Originally Posted by Spectre View Post
This is my guess, but official clarification would be nice:

Where my reasoning comes from:
they give little hints about not changing the character data until release, just in case there is a problem. Now ganted they are just talking about apperance here, but if apperance is that big of an issue to change and save, then progress may be a bigger issue.
They aren't truely worried about changing character appearance in BETA somehow affecting launch. They are more concerned that if someone had an issue changing their character during beta (lost their inventory for example), they wouldn't know what caused the issue (in the Beta), and therefore would have a hard time fixing the issue. They are being extremely careful with our initial character data because they don't want anyone to lose their character/inventory/or progress from 1.0. This however, does not affect progress, as a matter of fact, saving our progress in Phase 4, actually helps them protect our character data as they would at least have 2 save points to reference and use if issues arose.

Basically, importing characters and allowing us to progress on them could be considered a 'test' in and of itself. Adjusting imported characters, looks, names etc. is a whole separate issue and stress (test). Therefore, doing both at the same time, could make problem solving hard if a bug was found.